Dodgy Business

Motor racing lore says that a Grand Prix team's second season is a bit like a group's second album - a struggle. That will not have been missed by BMW Sauber as they head into 2007.

A new team has often burst onto the Grand Prix scene in a blaze of glory. Then, just as often, the second season is a damp squib. You can't better the debut of Austro-Canadian oil magnate Walter Wolf in 1977. In those days the season began in January, the 9th to be precise, and the team was together enough to actually win the Argentine Grand Prix, courtesy of Jody Scheckter.

Back then, the business was a lot simpler. The core was much of Frank Williams' staff and Scheckter was fortunate. Saying that, there was nothing wrong with the late Harvey Postlethwaite's WR1, a point Jody proved when he pipped Niki Lauda to the chequer in Monaco and, fittingly for Wolf, won again in Canada. Walter's team was fourth in the constructors' championship, which was won that year by Ferrari, and had amassed 55 points, putting them just five behind McLaren and seven adrift of Lotus.

The next season, reality struck. They scored just 24 points. James Hunt signed for '79 but retired abruptly after Monte Carlo and by the end of the year it was all over.

Bobby Rahal (Wolf WR5 Ford) 1978 USGP Watkins Glen (c) LAT

When Jordan Grand Prix made its F1 debut in 1991, a successful team from the lower echelons of the sport could still - just about - have realistic aspirations of making it into the big league. Eddie Jordan proved it even if, at the time, Marie Jordan and the local bailiffs begged to differ. Being fair, by that stage those aspirations probably weren't realistic. EJ was very much a one-off. "You've heard about robbing Peter to pay Paul," someone once said. "Well EJ's different - he robs Peter and totally fleeces Paul..."

Certainly it was a massive gamble and the absence of strong financial backing was a constant early problem, one that forced Jordan's hand in a number of directions...

Lack of Financial Clout

Jordan's debut was a case study in how a small racing-savvy group could still make a strong impression in F1 as late as the early nineties. Much of the car production was contracted out to the UK's unique racing cottage industry, there was a decent Ford engine, Goodyear tyres and a pairing of the experienced Andrea de Cesaris and, until he unloaded CS gas into a taxi driver's face, Bertrand Gachot. Both brought money and EJ even blagged a Porsche as compensation for the dreadful inconvenience of having to change his stationary when he wasn't allowed to run the car as a Jordan 911. Only him...

Gary Anderson's pretty green 191 was great to look at and the team finished its first season fifth in the constructors' championship with 13 points. Behind the 'big four' - McLaren (139), Williams (125), Ferrari (56.5) and Benetton (38.5) - Jordan was the team.

Stefano Modena (Jordan 192 Yamaha) 1992 Australian Grand Prix at Adelaide (c) LAT

But, in '92, oh dear. The record books reveal that Jordan finished 11th equal with Larrousse Lamborghini and Minardi Lamborghini, all on one solitary point.

By the end of '91 Jordan was hurting badly. Cosworth's engine bill was unpaid and debts were mounting. Sasol oil money from South Africa and an engine deal with Yamaha saved the day. But the fragile Yamaha had about as much grunt as a sewing machine and the team had a depressing season. It seemed to have lost its identity. The Irish green had gone and so had the swashbuckling performances. All down to the bottom line.

To his credit, Jordan realised that long-term he probably couldn't afford to non-perform for three years and so extricated himself from Yamaha even though it meant paying Brian Hart for engines. By this stage a major manufacturer engine deal was the only way forward but it was another two seasons before Jordan inherited McLaren's discarded Peugeots.

Lack of Development Opportunity

This is the key reason why teams struggle so much in year two -- the need to develop a new car while relentlessly racing all over the world every fortnight. It is often inextricably linked to staffing levels, although not so today in the case of big buck manufacturer operations.

In 1997 two high profile names took the plunge in F1 - Sir Jackie Stewart and Alain Prost.

Jan Magnussen (Stewart SF2 Ford) 1998 Canadian Grand Prix at Montreal (c) LAT

Admittedly Stewart's first year was not sensational. Rubens Barrichello's second place behind Michael Schumacher in a wet Monaco GP is what people remember but those six points were the team's only score of the season.

In 1998 they were fifth but scored one point less. It was a disappointing year spoiled by unreliability. The team had gone into the season believing that a top six finish was realistic. But they learned the lesson that a new car needed to be running long before the start of the new season because, once afflicted by reliability issues, problems snowball.

"Being late with the car was the biggest factor," design chief Alan Jenkins said. "It was easy to say we should have been earlier but there was only a handful of us (see below). We did the wind tunnel work for the SF2 early but there were other issues, such as the new grooved tyres. The job of building a new car was too big for us to do any earlier than we did."

Prost, like Jordan, had a great first year in 1997 and finished the season sixth, with 21 points. Impressive Bridgestone tyre performance certainly did the team no harm and after strong testing performances Olivier Panis finished second in Barcelona. When he broke his legs in Canada, replacement Jarno Trulli did a fine job, finishing fourth in Germany and confidently leading in Austria. Even Shinji Nakano scored a world championship point in Canada.

But then came 1988. That year, Alain Prost's catchphrase was: "We knew it was going to be tough, but not this tough." The team scored just a single point. The car was compromised by poor weight distribution, there was the distraction of a new factory at Guyancourt, 160 miles from the original base at Magny Cours, new technical regulations and, in Peugeot, a new engine partner, plus an expanding work force. Too much to cope with at one time.

Staffing Levels

A major bugbear of the '98 Prost was that the unreliable gearbox was too heavy with the weight in the wrong place. When the disgruntled Panis qualified 21st first time up in Melbourne, his car was about 10kgs over the weight limit while most of the opposition were 20kgs under and playing with movable ballast.

Olivier Panis (Prost AP01 Peugeot) 1998 French Grand Prix at Magny-Cours (c) LAT

Prost himself explained: "When we started the gearbox we had just 60 people. We were smaller even than Minardi. We had to put our confidence in one guy to design the 'box and it was difficult to supervise. We could have modified anything else on the car but changing that took too much time. On top, the factory move meant that we did no component production for more than six weeks."

The team trebled its workforce in eight months but, at times, had trouble scraping together enough heads to go to a meeting with Peugeot, who received a reasonable degree of criticism for not integrating better.

Management Folly

No surprises, perhaps, that this is the time to introduce Jaguar Racing. Born out of the old Stewart set up painted green, the team arrived to great fanfare in 2000 after a launch at Lord's cricket ground.

"The Cat's Back!" screamed the advertising hoardings as you got off the plane in Melbourne. All a bit odd when you considered 'The Cat' had never seen F1 in the first place.

Bobby Rahal and Niki Lauda at Jaguar, 2001 (c) LAT

Jaguar did not actually have a better first year than second in terms of results. In 2000 they were ninth with four points and, in '01, eighth with nine points. But, by now, with corporate concerns and marketing issues increasingly to the fore, there was all the baggage that comes with it.

After all the unsubstantiated hype of that first season, it initially appeared that the priorities were better in '01. The team didn't so much implode on the track as shoot themselves in the foot at regular intervals elsewhere.

Wolfgang Reitzle, Chairman of Premier Automotive Group (responsible for Aston Martin, Jaguar, Land Rover, Volvo and Lincoln) brought in Niki Lauda when the team already had Bobby Rahal in charge. In no time it was fairly obvious that Lauda was digging a big hole under Rahal, politics took over and everyone ended up watching their backs. Rahal narrowly failed to lure Adrian Newey from McLaren and was gone by mid season.

It seems anomalous to talk of second year syndrome at a team that still had many elements of the Stewart start-up group. But many of them remembered the problems Stewart faced in '98 and so an edict was laid down that the team's new engine and 'box had to be running by December 1. That meant that rear suspension and much of the aero direction had to be fixed early too and the team ended up believing that it suffered on the performance side because of it.

The Modern Day Challenge

These days, a team without money simply does not get as far as the grid. But money alone will not buy you world championships.

David Coulthard and Robert Doornbos (Red Bull RB2 Ferraris) 2006 Japanese Grand Prix at Suzukua (c) LAT

Red Bull has taken over Jaguar and, with Dietrich Mateschitz at the helm, has bravely set out to build the infrastructure necessary to take on the manufacturer teams, a very different task to that of 10-15 years ago

In year one, Red Bull did a good job to finish sixth with a respectable 38 points. Last year though, the team was hit by the age-old problem of developing a new car at the same time as racing, and specifically the need to incorporate a Ferrari instead of Cosworth engine.

"Undeniably our biggest issue was cooling," explained Mark Smith. "We fundamentally got it wrong and were over-optimistic with the packaging. There were two things. First, we went a bit too far in terms of it being on the limit. Second, we had a different engine and it's a fact of life that, thermally, no two engines behave the same. But, had we made the step with the Cosworth it would still have been a step too far. The fact we did it with an engine on which we didn't really understand the heat rejection just meant we were faced with a big learning curve on something we'd taken too far. It was a very difficult thing to come back from. The only real way out was a monocoque redesign but the logistics stopped us."

Smith adds that the team made mechanical steps with last year's RB2 but that Adrian Newey's priority was to push harder on RB3 and so there was no development of RB2 post Magny Cours, mid-season.

Then you have the likes of Toyota and Honda, both of which have resource but have adopted different approaches. Honda bought into BAR while Toyota set up its own operation in Cologne. Events at both teams in 2006, specifically the departure of design chiefs Mike Gascoyne and Geoff Willis respectively, were perhaps indicative of the difficulties faced by archetypal race team technical chiefs faced with operating amid flatter corporate management structures.

And so to Hinwil...

Many will argue that it is not really 'second year' for BMW Sauber, based on the fact that Sauber's admirable organisation has run pretty seamlessly at its Hinwil base since its F1 debut in 1993.

Robert Kubica tests the BMW Sauber F1.07 at Valencia (c) LAT

But this is a different team in a different era with different expectations. Peter Sauber was universally admired in the F1 paddock. A racer, a quiet man and a gentleman, he ran an efficient team with skilful husbandry and achieved as much as was realistically possible on the budget available.

But BMW wants a podium in '07. Certainly, lack of financial clout won't be an issue. Development opportunity should not be either, against the background of stable technical regulations and an engine homologation freeze. Staffing levels are up to around 400, but perhaps the biggest problem will be faced in incorporating the extra 100 or so recruits and getting the best out of them.

"At first that slows you down," technical chief Willy Rampf admitted. Hopefully there will not be any Jaguar-style management nonsense although some corners of the paddock mischievously suggest that the outwardly stable Mario Theissen may, in fact, be harbouring an ego...

What will the team achieve in '07? Robert Kubica is the intriguing element. He has shown glimpses of being top drawer. He is capable of bagging them their podium. Ultimately you would not be surprised if the team finished top four, but perhaps fifth of sixth is more likely.